Adobe and Google bring Photoshop to Chromebooks

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Google and Adobe are working together to bring the premiere photo editing suite to Chromebooks everywhere, but it’s starting with US-based Adobe education customers only. This isn’t a stripped-down version of Photoshop — it’s the real deal with built-in access to documents in Google Drive. One more catch — you need to have a Creative Cloud subscription to use Photoshop on a Chromebook.

Chromebooks are often running on very modest hardware, like the ARM-based models manufactured by Samsung and HP. So, how does Photoshop work on these machines? It’s not technically running on them at all. Instead, Adobe is virtualizing an instance of Photoshop on a server, then streaming everything to the Chromebook. Even if this makes the app a bit less responsive on middling connections, it means Photoshop on Chromebooks will always be up to date and will be accessible across multiple machines.

Chromebooks took a little while to catch on, but the low price and easy access to Google services are working for these machines. Sales keep going up, but you give up a few capabilities moving to a platform that’s built entirely around online tools. Photoshop has been one of the main applications keeping people tethered to Windows and Mac laptops, which Microsoft has pointed out in some of its advertising. This project could be a bigger deal for Google than it is for Adobe.

The Project Photoshop Streaming doesn’t just cover Chromebooks, though. Adobe’s application page makes it clear you can use Photoshop on Chrome OS or in the Chrome browser on Windows. Adobe will be admitting eligible parties slowly during the beta, but Photoshop streaming should be more widely available in the future. The required Creative Cloud subscription is a bit of a bummer, but that’s actually the only way you can buy new versions of Photoshop anymore. It makes some sort of sense in that context.